The Protestant ethic

It looked like today was going to be pretty tranquil. I'd heard that the government would be voting again on the austerity measures demanded by the EU and the IMF, I'd read that the unions had called a general strike, and I knew that the indignants had called for a huge protest on Syntagma. But when I walked down to Syntagma this morning, there were no police men waving me away, and no massed ranks of police vans, only a modest blockade of Irodou Attikou, where the Presidential Residence is. And after I'd made one pass of my hourglass-shaped trench, and well before the sun had gotten to me, I was sent to wash pottery by the Stoa of Attalus.

Washing pottery is a pretty pleasant task, especially when compared to digging. Equally monotonous, it has the advantage of allowing you to sit down and talk with other diggers around a tub of water, like campers around a fire. Today I worked through two or three buckets of coarse sherds with the two Greek students who work on our excavation, which allowed me to pick up some useful new phrases in modern Greek ('I am tired and hungry'). It also allowed me to hear about the University of Athens, Greek-led archaeology in Greece, and what two students thought about the government.

They didn't think much of it. One of them had heard - and the other believed - that the police had been deliberately allowing central Athens to fill up with immigrants, which was driving housing costs down, allowing those linked to the political elite to snap up valuable properties for artificially low prices. People didn't want to live downtown with immigrants because the most desperate among them could be driven to crime - as in a recent case of a man who was shot for his camera while preparing to drive his wife, who had just gone into labour, to hospital.

At the end of the day I walked with one of the agorathenians through Monastiraki Square, where she called a friend on her mobile asking if they were protesting in Syntagma. We then walked up into Syntagma from the south-west side, with the scene around us becoming gradually more chaotic as we went on. When we entered the square itself I could hear what sounded like shots being fired again, and over in the north-west corner of the square there was a flame several feet high licking the gassy air. There seemed to be some sort of skirmishing going on in that area, but most of the action appeared to be concentrated at the eastern edge of the square, where it faces onto the National Parliament.

As we crossed over into the main part of the square a young man wearing a mask approached us holding a spray-bottle. He sprayed my friend in the face, and then, after giving me time to remove my sunglasses, did the same to me. When I looked at my friend again, her face was covered with what looked like white stage makeup; she told me it was Maalox, a kind of stomach medicine that the protesters put on their faces to mitigate the effects of tear gas. There were people all around us with similarly whitewashed faces, walking to and from talking, and occasionally setting fire to cans of garbage.

When we got up to Amalias, the street which divides the square from Parliament, my Greek colleague went to join her friends at the protest while I turned towards the north-east exit of the square. My conversation with George had confirmed that I disagreed with the vast majority of the protestors' beliefs, and I already knew that I did not sympathize with their methods. I passed an immigrant selling bottled water, looked up at the rows of policemen, six or seven deep, outside of Parliament, and went onto Panepistimiou.

It was only when I got onto Panepistimiou that I started being bothered by the tear gas. It looked like there was a small band of policemen firing canisters in the alleyway where the Cartier and Bulgari shops are, along with the cafe where I'd been charged 6 Euros for a double cappuccino a fortnight previously. When I stopped to wait for the light to change so that I could cross Akadimias, I noticed two policemen standing near me in full riot gear, looking like futuristic re-imaginings of medieval knights. There was a young couple rushing to get their baby away from the encroaching clouds of tear gas.

Then I was in Kolonaki. Three ladies took a break from their al fresco lunch to giggle at me, and an older man stopped me, pointing at my face. I tried to tell him in Greek that someone else had done my make-up, and he laughed but gestured to me to wipe it off, saying 'astynomia' (police). When I got home one of my American flatmates had been searched by them on the way home, while the other had some pictures of the rioting, including one of a masked man approaching McDonald's with two chunks of marble in his hands. My US colleagues were not impressed. 'We come here to study the founders of modern civilization,' one complained, 'and instead what we get are these damn hooligans!'